


one note in a song

by spoke



Category: The Stolen Child - William Butler Yeats
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24104089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: I absolutely love this poem, and especially the cover by Loreena McKennit. Thank you so much for the opportunity to explore what might be going on here!
Comments: 11
Kudos: 5
Collections: Once Upon a Fic 2020





	one note in a song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamiflame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamiflame/gifts).



It was quiet enough, so late at night, that she thought every sound must surely wake her parents, or worse, her older brother. The little ones might think it was a dream, or be convinced to go back to sleep, but Ed would either tell on her or insist on coming with. 

And she wasn’t sure they’d show up if he did.

So she flinched a little at every creak in the floorboards, and tried not to gasp when she shut the door. Five steps away from the house, she was still walking quietly in case it was too close, and then ten steps, and then she was racing towards the woods. She didn’t stop until the path started to weave sharply, breathing in the scents of the trees with a sense of relief so deep she almost wanted to cry. It took a few moments for her breathing to steady enough that she felt safe continuing, because they’d warned her that not everything of their land was even as friendly as they were.

She was pretty sure they weren’t all that friendly, but to be honest neither was she. 

Once she was sure her own breathing wasn’t going to give her away to something that might eat her, she started on again. She’d never been this far on her own before, but she could remember what it looked like as things started to change. She figured it was her best bet to find her way back again - it wasn’t as if they’d left her anything to find her way back by. So she picked her way through the trees, checking as she went for the mushrooms that looked very much like tiny houses, and the owls with oddly knowing eyes. There were other things, but she couldn’t quite remember them. 

If she hadn’t seen the sheep that something had been at, and heard all the whispers going around the farms nearby, she might have thought she’d been dreaming. People didn’t have skin that pale, after all, or eyes round as pebbles and black as tar. She was sure the grownups would have found them scary, and said they came from the Devil or something. But if the way her mum treated her own kids didn’t count for that, then their opinions didn’t matter at all.

She’d been watching the sheep the first tme she heard them singing. Cool, clear voices like running water almost, though she knew there wasn’t any nearby. The closest thing in that pasture was the old well, and it was’t much more than a puddle down there anymore. She’d still gotten up to take a look, thinking maybe someone had fallen in, or ...something, she didn’t really know. But the only things down there were the muck and the frogs, same as ever, and she’d turned around to go back to the sheep. 

Only there weren’t any sheep, and there wasn’t any pasture. There was a lot of water, though. Just everywhere, looking like it was glowing a bit, like moonlight. She’d stood there dumbfounded for a minute, maybe, and then shrugged and started trying to pick her way on the bits of land that stood in all that wet. She heard laughing, then, and looked up into perfectly round eyes that looked as lightly glowing as the water, like a bit of it had decided to pretend it was human and didn’t know how. 

They said, or it felt like they said, hello. They definitely weren’t regular talking, it was more like music trying to be words, and that made as much sense as anything else about them. They had skin that was way too pale, and they were... sort of human shaped, but too skinny and too graceful. When they asked if she wanted to dance, and she said yes, they flitted away like they weren’t actually touching the ground. Or the water, for that matter, no ripples on it. It was almost like a dream, because when she followed them, she slowly started moving a little like they did, and by the time the owls were gliding by and seeming to talk with their eyes, she was matching them step for step.

And the dancing! She’d never dreamed of dancing like this, so light and feeling so close to the other dancers. It was as if they were weaving in and out of the world around them, like it was all strung up on a loom and each of the dancers was a shuttle. Everyone knew their parts, even herself, and she could feel that she was adding something to it that was needed, only she didn’t want to think too closely about what that was. 

And when she tried, because she couldn’t let the itching little feeling alone, she sort of woke up, she guessed. She was back in the pasture with the sheep, and everything half-fading from her mind. There was the dancing, and the owls... part of the tune that kept running through her mind, and little mushroom houses, and flowers growing impossibly huge and bright, and fruit that she just knew was stolen. She could almost name the farmer they’d gotten those cherries from, if she could just remember clearly. She’d have been sure she dreamed the whole thing up, except her daydreams had never been that odd, and mostly concearned unlikely ways of getting out of the countryside. To do what, she wasn’t even sure.

She just knew she wanted to leave, her home especially but the whole area as a rule, and after that day she wanted to go back to that place more and more. Even after the sheep started... well, disappearing would’ve been better than getting killed by something that everyone said couldn’t be a wolf. And other odd things had started happening, children talking about hearing voices that didn’t sound as if they were at all like her voices, adults saying they’d seen odd creatures. And every so often, from the corners of her eyes, she’d see herself something that had to come from that watery place she’d danced in.

It was as if there were a flood rising through the countryside, and she felt as if she knew where a boat was, but every time she turned to the sound, or to catch what was in the corner of her eye, it disappeared. Every night she felt like she was seeing them again, dreaming maybe, and little fragments would stick with her. She wondered, turning those feelings over in her mind, if something wasn’t staying there too - but she didn’t think she felt any different, just less patient, less concerned with the world.

Meanwhile, even her family couldn’t miss how distracted she was getting. Mum became even crueler than usual, and Da... well, he’d always ignored things. It just got harder to pretend he wasn’t ignoring things, that he didn’t somehow miss how mum treated them. It wasn’t so different, just that every single thing felt like a harder blow, until the day one of their own sheep was taken by whatever and she screamed back at mum. 

Mum had never hit her before. Ed yes, and she thought some of the little ones, but she’d tried so hard to be good, to be the reliable eldest daughter mum wanted in spite of everything, and now? 

Now she was out in the woods, looking for mushroom houses and owls with too-wise eyes, and thinking herself a bit of a fool for it in spite of everything. But she’d keep looking, or keep walking until she found out what town might be on the other side of the forest. If there was an other side of the forest, which reason said there should be. But reason said a lot of things that weren’t true, at least in her life, so this might be another one of those. 

She might have found out, if she hadn’t been looking at the ground so closely, trying to see if a mushroom had a door. That one didn’t, but there was a trail of slightly glowing water leading away from it for a moment, that vanished and reappeared as she started to follow it. When she started humming what she could remember of the dancing song, it glowed brighter and became steady, spreading out as she went along until she looked away from the eyes of an owl and into the eyes of a creature like water pretending to be human. The last thought in her mind that felt human was to wonder how long her family here would look for her, before deciding the fairies had stolen her away.

Hello, she said in a voice that wasn’t one, and they held out their hands.

**Author's Note:**

> I absolutely love this poem, and especially the cover by Loreena McKennit. Thank you so much for the opportunity to explore what might be going on here!


End file.
